George Saunders Quotes

I like suggesting that 'we are slaves to the objects around us,' that 'plenty should be enough,' or that the 'buyer should beware,' within the context of conventional selling space.

The corruption of the American soul is consumerism.

I never bought the commercial thing, at any stage of the game.

America is really happy to be sold something.

Consumerism is our national religion.

Modern man, if he dared to be articulate about his concept of heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest department store in the world, showing new things and gadgets, and himself having plenty of money with which to buy them.

I think about capitalism, consumerism, our consumptive nature as a species approaching the 21st century. I certainly don't have the answers.

It's very hard to imagine the phrase 'consumer society' used so cheerfully, and interpreted so enthusiastically, in England.

I love consumerism, TV culture, shopping malls. There's nothing I'd ever buy, but I like being there. It's wacky.

We belabour, I think, under a very heavy crust of consumerism really.

In twenty-first-century America, our stories have become one and the same: we work to consume, we live to consume, we are what we consume.

All of my work is meant to evoke a whole bunch of different layers of discord between the attraction and repulsion that we feel toward our consumer habits and our consumer lives.

Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.

With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?

Buying is a profound pleasure.

I shop, therefore I am.

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.

Some people see Black Friday as a much-needed break for their wallet. I see it as retail outlets showing the customers the full weight of their contempt. The frenzy to buy cheap crap from China, the human downgrade of people fighting with each other over items they can probably live without, to me, is an insult.

I've felt a little culpable that we entrepreneurs often invent businesses just to drive people to buy more things.

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.

I'm totally anti-commercialism.

We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.

Most human beings are defined in terms of their capacity to consume.

Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.

Madison Avenue makes us addicts of consumerism, using glass wampum to steal our capacity to direct our own lives.